Open Access and Preprints in Educational Research

• In Event: Actions for Increasing the Credibility of Educational Research

Abstract

What are open access and preprints?
Open access refers to content that is freely available and not behind a paywall. In applied fields like education, open access expands availability of research to the ultimate consumers: parents, practitioners, and policymakers. There are entire journals that are open access (e.g., AERA Open), whereas other journals have particular articles that are open access. The cost structure for open access can vary, but often includes author processing charges. Although this may feel like an additional burden to authors and something previously associated with publications lacking credibility, these fees are a cost shift from the consumer (e.g., institutional libraries) to the producer (e.g., researchers). The shift in cost is most relevant to authors, whereas the shift in accessibility is most relevant to consumers.

Preprints provide a complementary system to the traditional journal publication route. Preprints are unpublished versions of manuscripts. The first preprint server, arXiv, was created in 1991, now housing over 1.5 million papers. The Center for Open Science is home to many community-based preprint services, including EdArxiv (launching August 2019). EdArXiv is a free, open source, non-profit service that allows education researchers to post their work. The term “preprint” can be misleading as the unformatted version of peer-reviewed manuscripts, often called postprints, can also be shared. Preprints have generally not yet been peer-reviewed. As such, preprints should be critically evaluated and their results taken as tentative.

Value to Education Community
Teachers and policymakers who cannot access research findings cannot base their actions on those findings. Moreover, researchers from developing countries often have severely limited access to the research base, and researchers from developed countries have incomplete access The traditional publishing model restricts access to information to a narrow group. Open access and preprints expand access to research to all.

In 2017, six AERA journals that are normally closed became open access for a two-month period. Gershenson, Polikoff, and Wang (2019) assessed the unadvertised openness and found that downloads in the newly-open journals increased by 60% - 80%. By increasing accessibility to research, more people read the research and, in theory, allowed for more educators to base their actions and instruction on the most-recent scientific knowledge.

Preprints allow authors to get feedback prior to submission, disseminate their work, and avoid publication bias against null or unpopular results. Links to manuscripts on preprint servers remain static, making them useful for discoverability and researchers whose institutional affiliation changes. Moreover, although these results should be interpreted with caution, a recent analysis of preprints from bioRxiv found that manuscripts with a preprint received higher Altmetric scores and more citations than articles without a preprint (Serghiou & Ioannidis, 2018).

Resources & Advice to Get Started
Resources such as where to seek funds for author processing charges and preprint servers, how to determine which journals allow pre- and post-prints, and how to justify/explain the use of open access and preprint servers will be discussed. Lessons learned by those who have posted preprints and helped create EdArXiv will be shared.

Authors

• Amanda Montoya, University of California - Los Angeles

• Matthew C. Makel, Johns Hopkins University

• Bryan G. Cook, University of Virginia

• Kendal Smith, University of North Texas